skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can install the command line tools without XCode if you download them from the Apple Developer site.
not necessarily. e.g Nokia's Meego platform was open, yet it was extremely well designed
> Give me a profession remotely close to programming in the following ways: Little or no required education...

> Programming is money for nothing.

This is not called programming. It's called monkey job. Programming requires education (i.e. being a knowledgeable professional in computing, software engineering and so on) and it's not money for nothing by any means.
You can use Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Dn by holding fn while using the arrow keys.
Same goes for the Samsung lawsuit. What notable intellectual property did Samsung the "thief" steal?
Yeah my purely speculative, non scientific list goes like this:

1) The Bay Area (Silicon Valley + SF etc.) - Pretty much perpetually

2) NYC

3) Austin,Tx and Boston are tied

3.5) Chicago

4) Seattle, Boulder,Co ; and Los Angeles are tied

5) Any other major city with a good engineering school in the vicinity or other major money industry with that needs a few Computer Science and/or IT guys around (i.e. Oil)

A few cities like this include: Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Washington D.C., Miami, Kansas City (especially since Google Fiber is rolling out there), and Las Vegas

Just for info, I currently live in Austin. Almost moved to SF but just finished school and prefer the nightlife in Austin
I am sure lenovo has produced inferior laptops before, but the X1 Carbon was supposedly stress tested by machines that open and close the lid for days on end to test the hinge, and also machines that press the keys repeatedly, to ensure that the function of these components do not deteriote substantially over time.
Razer Blade Mk2: The Kotaku Review
UML is very useful to communicate ideas and designs to the rest of your team. It doesn't have to be 100% strict UML. It just has to get the point across. I use http://www.asciiflow.com/ to make simple UML diagrams that I add to my code when it helps clarify the code's structure. So I disagree that you have to "live in the land of too-tight blue ties" to find UML useful.
While I understand your sentiment, I respectfully disagree that it does not matter if it's a smart idea. Because if it is not a smart idea then that means we can do better. One of the projects I'm working on solves the "closed ecosystem" problem. The use of the term "closed ecosystem" is ironic because it seems to me that the "open" nature of email receiving (not sending) is what leads to the spam problem. In other words, I do not see the problem as the fact that people can send mass quantities of junk email. I see the problem as the fact that daemons accept and deliver mail from anyone. (And then resort to blacklisting.) What if the system was "closed" by default and instead a sender would contact the receiving SMTP daemon directly (no internediary) and would first need either a means of authentication (i.e. he has been pre-approved) or a way to have his sending address revieved and then receive permission to send. Right now you can see someting like this within a domain. For example, one gmail user might be able to send to another gmail user, directly, as they are both able to authenticate. They both have accounts (private accounts, not some RBL, DKIM or other scheme managed by an interloper) and these accounts can be checked. But if one gmail user wants to send to some non-gmail address, the non-gmail recipient has no knowledge of the sender in the form of an account against which he can authenticate. There's no privity between sender and receiver. Instead third party schemes are used. Such as blocklists for sending.

Consider the idea of running a mailserver than only accepts mail from a predetermined set of sending addresses. What would be the chances of receiving junk mail?
Mm... great article, but I can't help feeling it skips over the important bits.

"But your boss is likely to be receptive if you politely raise the question of productivity and show you’re willing to be held accountable for results, rather than hours worked."

Yeah right.

The problem is that it's extremely non trivial to deconstruct your assumptions and social behaviour.

Even if your boss/manager/whatever is clued up and knows his/her stuff, workplaces are a social gathering, and quiet introverted non-socialising members of the team will never get rewarded for their hard work. Especially if they're seen leaving early every day.

Where I work, we have a guy who leaves at 3pm every day; he gets in between 5-6am.

His own team gives him the 'ironic' farewell round of applause when he walks out everyday.

Why? Because he's leaving early.

He's a hard working dedicated worker, but appearances are important, and leaving early makes it appear that you're slacking off, that you're not there when you're needed for that last minute 5pm meeting.

The few people who actually know what he does completely respect him; but no one else gets it.

That's the problem: unless you publize not only to your immediate work peers, but the entire local work area, what you're doing and why, no one gets it, and they make assumptions.

This article would be more useful if it addressed that issue.

Simply saying: Work hard, leave early and get your boss to accept you for who you are... agh. Don't. It wont work.
I like how you have to pretend you're sharing music when you just want to show the Internet the output of your mathematical computations. What a world.
That's beside the point. The people in any field know their colleagues, and know whose results are suspect. One should ask rather, how much taxpayer's money was spent on science fiction, and why it tends to take several years until the professor in charge is busted. After all, there are usually several grad students in on the joke, it's not that that sort of fraud was perpetrated in secret.
First thoughts on Go
Thanks patio11 - I'll do all of that.

What do you mean by "non-trivial sales off the website"? I tried to google it - but didnt find anything?
thanks erantion - I'll work on all of that. I appreciate the detailed reply
I wish we could get these anti-spam zealots to apply the same effort to stopping junk postal mail. The history of direct mail is interesting and perhaps instructive. It has been kept alive by those who do the delivery (cf. those who do the sending). I have sometimes wondered if the same might be true for email.

If your emplyer knows its recipients (e.g. business partners) and can coordinate with them to run an SMTP service for recieving and sending messages on a different port, would that solve the problem?
Somewhere interruptions tie into productivity in a big way yet are rarely addressed. A one-minute interruption doesn't only delay you by a minute, it takes you some time to collect yourself and continue where you left off. Work in an office, away but tethered by phone or even only by IM/text it's all the same to varying degrees. A typical office gets you all these at the same time so the standard work environment is the worst in this sense. Offsite with limited, guaranteed only pre-scheduled contact is the ideal, at least for me.
The consequences of bad legal work are uncertain and tend to be much delayed.

That's a really good point. Well over 50% of the "lines of code" in a typical complex business contract cover contingencies that ideally will not happen. That means they will likely never be "executed." That, in turn, allows the legal profession to be held to very different quality standards than an engineer or programmer.

As a freelance developer I often find myself reviewing contracts and consulting agreements prior to signing them, and I'm rarely impressed with either the original language of the documents I'm given by clients, or with the reviewing skills of the attorneys I engage to look them over. Yet it's inevitable that the attorneys who wrote (i.e., cut-and-pasted together) these agreements, and who review them on my behalf, will make more on an hourly basis than I will when I perform the work.
Some, maybe all, of those words used to be diagnoses of intellectual disabilities. I don't think laymen distinguish them much at all; I was never taught to do so. If the goal is to deter everyone from showing contempt for lack of intelligence (though I don't think that's going to happen) I don't see another word with the same connotation as progress. Am I overlooking something?
Stop giving equal emphasis to your call to action for signup and your "view features" button. View features should just be a link in the menu at the top of the page, or maybe just include it directly on the homepage.

Your landing page should have one single call to action, one single activity you want your visitor to do.
Two of the main reasons are Display Modes and TAP support.

Also, you don't need ASP.NET MVC 4 to use ASP.NET Web API. Just install Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi package into your existing ASP.NET MVC 3 project, you will be good to go. Just be careful for the order of routes. Both ASP.NET MVC and Web API routes collected under the same collection and a request may go into another pipeline rather than intended one if routes aren't set up properly.
I've never really been able to get into Vim, but this is completely awesome! Especially on laptops, where scrolling and hitting links without a mouse is really annoying normally. (yes, I know, page up / down, but those scroll too much)
Firefox - Vimperator
I've been using TeXstudio as a LaTeX editor - it's a fork of TeXmaker with more features (notably a user-editable spelling dictionary). The UI is Qt, and it's available cross-platform.
Thinking that taking a multiple choice test will prevent you from causing a bug that will kill someone is as smart as learning to be a lifeguard from youtube tutorials.

Organizations that create weapons, spaceships, medical equipment and anything that can and will kill you if it has any bugs, needs to enforce quality not by certifying the engineers, but by certifying the organization to follow very rigid quality criteria. Some companies just have it naturally (perhaps Apple is a nice example) some companies need a structure (see things like http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/)

So if this is not for saving lives, then I don't see any purpose in taking or creating this test.

if you can code, you'll get a job, if your code is bad and has a lot of bugs, our software cycle is so fast you'll be forced to either improve or switch a profession. or work on non critical software.
> When you find yourself challenging the basis of nearly all economic theories

Keynesian economic theories. And look at where they have gotten us today. Saving is a good thing, despite what many economists say.
Leveraging procrastination to get more work done
Of course, if the documents don't need to be edited by their recipients, PDF is even more of a de facto standard than .doc{,x}
Also, your landing page is perfectly setup to drop in a large, beautiful image of a house or condo or something. As it stands right now, your product feels...Mathematical? Technical? Engineer-y? It's the graph paper/checkers and the lack of anything tangible beyond the tablet devices.

Throw a picture with some grass in it on there. Make it real.
I think that sums it up pretty well. The citizen reporter Wu Gan ("The Butcher") who the author interviewed for the piece put it thusly:

"Some innocent people have been hurt, [and] personal privacy has not been protected, especially when information is incorrect. This kind of thing only happens in deformed countries. Because there's no rule of law or democracy, the Internet becomes citizens' only means of redress," he wrote to me.

How closely this bears resemblance to what is called doxing here is up for debate; but certainly there is a difference in political import between doxing and this "human flesh search."
He means you might need to sell to this market directly, with sales account managers and inside salespeople dialing for dollars, instead of hoping that your market will seek out your website. What indication do you have that anyone is searching for this kind of product?
Didn't have time to read the entire story, but I'm a Chinese and I know that story.

So for those of you who didn't know yet, I'd like to point out that, the Internet is currently the only way for people in the "people's republic" to voice publicly and (possibly) get heard and taken cared by the authority.

IIRC, years ago Kai-Fu Lee had a speech at Stanford (?) explained such particular phenomenons (such as why Internet is the only trustworthy news source in China).
Can you explain how your company uses ROWE? Was it there when you started, or did you witness the shift from hour-based work/pay to results-based work/pay?
Good list, though I'd think that D.C. would rank higher considering it's supposed to be a huge (growing?) tech center. Or maybe those jobs are just for government.
I've been using Vimium in Chrome/Chromium and Vimperator/Pentadactyl in Firefox for quite a while, it really transforms your browsing experience, changing it from a mouse-centric activity to a keyboard-centric one (with a significant increase in productivity). I highly recommend to anyone who is familiar with Vim.
I had totally forgotten about that, although I have seen WebForms used in an MVC site as well.

I did NOT intend to imply that it was a replacement for WCF. I meant to imply that it is a replacement for the WCF REST Starter Kit, and if MS didn't make a huge deal out of it, a lot of people that had gotten used to using WCF for web services would never see it.
They can also use the the Java VM or CLR as those are both stack machines.
This sort of intelligent reflection on personal experience makes for valuable comments.

Particularly good: "You see this question of 'can you see yourself as a programmer when you are 50' does not have much to do with ageism or the labor market but about people's inner feelings and desires. Some people are horrified to see themselves as programmers when they are 50, not because of the market but because they secretly loathe it."

I hope you do get back into engineering, and write about it.
Which has been done frequently in the past with gray-market auto imports.
If you fetch/read mail locally, you can get around this by pulling down emails from the spam folder directly via IMAP.

Hotmail email forwarding has this same issue, but only has POP access, so you can only access the inbox without the web interface. You can tune down the aggressiveness of the spam filter to a minimum (but not turn it completely off).
ASP.NET MVC is approx. 3 years old product and to support the features of the current ASP.NET Web API in an elegant way, lots of breaking changes would occur in ASP.NET MVC. This is just one of the reasons. You might also see this one as another impl. detail but it is the brutal truth.

Gleen Block has a 20 minutes long video on this topic if you need more info: http://www.tugberkugurlu.com/archive/why-do-i-need-asp-net-w...
Your only negative on the bay area seems to be high rent.

I'd suggest you turn that around. High rents are an excellent indicator of opportunity and quality of life. Location is a market and the good things cost more.

For someone just starting out, there's nothing like the bay area. Of course, I've been around the block a few times and I've moved to Seattle to get away from valley groupthink.

Nothing beats visiting in person. Spend time in each place you'd consider and you'll just know what feels right.
Firefox to Get Chrome-like Web Installer
Theres a good volume of google keyword searches that target what we do. The topic also comes up in property magazines and property forums.

My 'traffic' to the website is ok (kind of what I hoped for) - but the conversion is way way below expectations.
Is 'funkyjizzbeats20' a typo for 'funkyjazzbeats20'?
I see what you are saying - thanks very much. I'll a/b test the text, and then I'll a/b test the graphics.
The website look and feel is good.But I would like to see if you have talked to few startups interested to work with you. Put their logo at the bottom of your sites mentioning that these are the top startups hiring job seekers.
That way you can attract more user(job seekers) to your site.
Calling people names is against the guidelines and the spirit of HN regardless of past comment history.
You should introduce more people - here's a blueprint
"clicking" on links by pressing f is super cool.
Quality of life- the Bay Area has unrivaled weather: It sounds like you've never lived a whole year in SF weather! Although its nicer certain times of year in palo alto or berkeley, etc. =] To answer your question, though: consider specialty niche.

SV - For pure tech or big-blue-sky-idea-ish. Also, anything HW (viz apple, chips, tesla etc) or hands-on engineering.

NY -Doesn't have the "tinker in the garage" culture traditionally, due to high-rent and lack of garages ;). But for Finance/BigCo, Avertising/ad-tech, Data Analytics, Specialty Retail/fashion/etc, or Old Media (copyright/music/publishing), and EMAE facing international markets it's very competitive.

[ex-us]

London - Similar to NY for specialty. Lacks the VC and start-up bench-depth of talent to some extent. Similar to SF weather, better nightlife and public tranist. More $$$.
Funny you mention Chicago. I'm there right now for a business trip, and decided I'd love to move here. I was wondering about the startup scene though...

I currently live in Long Beach, CA which is 30 mins south of LA, and it blows. There is a distinct lack of techies and nobody is working on solving interesting problems. Maybe it's different in LA proper though.
What financial regulations don't apply to Bitcoin?

Just because you're using Dunning-Krugerrands instead of US Dollars doesn't mean what you're doing with them isn't transacting, banking, investing and so on.

It's the act that's regulated, not the currency used for it. (Though that could be regulated too.)
Ask HN: Who was invited to the Startup School Reception on Friday?
At least you get a few quiet hours between 6 and 9 to actually get things done. I've noticed much less resentment of people who come in after 10 and leave after 6. Same hours, different perception.

Because somehow, no one sees you come in, but everyone sees you go home.
> (from that time)

Are you trying to imply that 'mail servers' are some sort of ancient devices whose era has come and gone?
Seems to be down. I'm interested to see when it is up though, we could use a modern custom tshirt site done right.
This is an excellent article. I disagree with the naysayers that say it's too long. The short articles I see are usually half-inspired and incomplete. This is bookmark material. I hope that I follow even half of this advice effectively one year from now.

Thank you!
That says more about who you know than the real distribution of programmer salaries. It's not common, but those kinds of compensation scales definitely exist?
At best, I've seen a few instances where very (very) small consulting firms may internally adhere to this and then just bill a client whatever they feel the appropriate amount(s) are for their work, split out into chunks of hours on invoices, so as to give the appearance to the clients that the billable model is in effect.
Sometimes its something so non technical as relationships between coworkers or founders fall a part.
Apple Spent A Reported $50 Million To Improve The App Store. Is It Any Better?
There's a quote I can't quite place right now (maybe from a TED talk?), but a metrics-oriented guy went to one of these top salesman companies and calculated the inter-year correlation of performance bonuses. Most of the salesmen figured it would be low - it turned out to be almost exactly 0.
Not always. Saving means I'm foregoing some consumption today in favor of undetermined consumption tomorrow. If everyone saves too much, we aren't taking full advantage of our production capacity today (because we don't know yet what they will want, and it may be perishable anyway). It's like traffic, rush hour is bad because everyone waited rather than using the highway when it was idle mid-day.
I worked in an office where we got the work done... and we did.

And then we were given more tasks. And more tasks. To the point that there was no way to get everything done on a deadline.

At some point I said to myself, I could pull an all-nighter, still have missed deadlines, or I could go home at 5, and have maybe one less missed deadline. It was an easy choice.

Unless you work in a place that only has need for a finite amount of work, no matter how effective you are getting things done, there will always be more things to do. If there is only a finite amount of work to be done, then an employee is not what you need - a contractor is.

(Of course a good manager will balance the number of engineers to the work load. Ours did say that he had enough to hire two more engineers -- but didn't know if he would have this much work for them next quarter.)
> As to Estonia, it's GDP per capita, is only 67% of the EU average and 17% of that of Norway, a socialist country.

Estonia was annexed by the USSR. It's only been a free economy since 1990. Norway didn't have to deal with that.

More importantly, oil. Norway has oil. Being one of the largest exporters of oil in the world gives it a huge boost.

So I don't really get your point. Estonia still has one of the fastest growing economies in the EU, which is what really matters.
CodeCrap - Where developers go to laugh and cry
You gotta fix your website (I'm using Chrome, and the background image took forever to load, and for the longest time I was puzzled by the small window to the right with some text). Not leaving a very good impression... Plus $29?
This is a humourous demonstration of the planning fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy), which is a direct derivation of the the anchoring bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring). This bias causes humans to be unable to adjust conjunctive (multiplicative) probability sets down low enough to accurately predict the total time to completion of complex tasks.

Basically - even though the actual chance of implementing any part of a program is very high - the multiplied probabilities of all the parts working together fall geometrically towards 0. Due to anchoring, humans don't adjust down far enough which in turns leads them to underestimate the total time to completion of various tasks.
His boss should really pick up on that and figure out some way to communicate it. Mentioning casually at a status meeting that this person gets in early and as a result leaves early and that this is a good thing would work: it's subtle acknowledgement and approval which I'd guess is enough.
I think Google+ and Facebook complement each other in some sense. Facebook is social network which is mostly used communicate with "friends" and Google+ to communicate with like-minded people.
I suspect he meant "be home at", rather than "get home at".
Oh yeah? That's strange, seems responsive to me. I'll look into it.
Says the guy with a username of 'tmp458' who has exactly one comment, above. How many accounts did you create to flag my comment?

I'm not a troll account. I haven't been terribly active. I do tend to read more than write. "Take a look and ban"? Why bother taking a look if banning is called for?
How about Google Profile before the G+? I actually find myself still using G+ in the same way I used Google Profile...
Sorry about that; the splash image is a bit large and could use some optimization.